1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a semiconductor operating apparatus, and in particular, to a counter circuit and a method of operating the same.
2. Related Art
Generally, a conventional counter circuit is configured by a plurality of flip-flops that operate in accordance with an input of a clock to perform a counting up or a counting down operation. A counting up-down signal is input to each of the flip-flops, and the counting up or down operation is determined on the basis of the level of the input add or subtract signal. When such flip-flops perform the counting up or down operation, a carry is produced and then supplied to a next flip-flop.
However, the conventional counter circuit performs an operation (counting up or down operation) by 1. Specifically, the conventional counter circuit according to the related art can only perform an operation that increments or decrements by a decimal number of 1 to or from a number that is previously stored. Accordingly, when the counter circuit repeatedly increments or decrements by a relatively large number, it takes a large amount of time to perform the operation with the numerical value of 1, which reduces the time efficiency.
Moreover, the counter circuit according to the related art can not perform the operation with the numerical value of 2, that is, it is impossible to increment or decrement by 2 or larger to or from the number that is previously stored. Therefore, it is difficult to effectively perform operations and the operation time is undesirably increased.